Thoughts about astral projection / OOBE

Hi. Following is my general understanding of this. I also have a question at the end if anyone wants to try to answer that.

In normal waking life, a person's experience occurs in a mentally generated cartoon of their external surroundings. That cartoon incorporates current information from the eyes and other senses. Your mind uses colors to approximately represent different bands of light, almost like how colors can be used to represent other kinds of things like temperature or rainfall in a computer generated map. But the colors aren't really "out there", they're in your mind. Similarly, when you move your body, you're manipulating a mental model of where your body is, how heavy it is, how strong it is, etc. For instance, when you pick up a cup you know how hard you need to squeeze it so that it stays in your grip but isn't crushed by it. This isn't something that just happens automatically, you use feedback from your senses while picking the cup up, but are also depending on a thought or model of how your body works, which is to a large extent built from experience.

A person also has a "mind's eye", by which I mean an ability to picture other subjects of thought besides the big, powerful vision that represents what's going on at the moment. In a regular dream that has visual imagery, a person uses that "mind's eye" to project an imaginary environment.

In a lucid dream, generally speaking, a person isn't using their "mind's eye" any more, they're using the primary picture generating ability that they usually use for to represent their waking environment, except that their driving it almost exclusively from their imagination, without incorporating current sense information. Their tactile sense of "where" they are is still a pretend sort of thing though, a fantasy world.

In a "sleep paralysis" type lucid dream, the dreamer's mental model of "where" they are is representing their physical environment, instead of a fantasy dream environment. Its "awake" in that sense. But since your body is unable to move, if you try to force your model of where your body is to move anyway, you can overpower your sense of where your body actually is, and separate the two. Then you are "astral projecting". People use these words in different ways, but I think in a lot of "out of body" experiences, a person isn't separating their sense of where their body is from where their body actually is, they're using their "primary" means of imagining where their body is to represent a hypothetical third person view. Normally, in addition to having a sense of where on is in one's environment, a person also has a sort of "court awareness" where they have a sense of how they appear from other perspectives. In the floating-at-the ceiling type out of body experience, they've shifted their sense of perspective to one of those alternative perspectives which they normally have but don't normally visualize in first person.

I don't think the fact that astral projection seems "as real as waking life" says anything about whether or not its a dream, because waking life is in an important sense already a type of dream, as I described earlier. To objectively know whether there's anything paranormal going on, you also have to test whether there is information in the experience that can't be extrapolated or guessed from current or previous sensate information. My impression is that most of the time, for most people, most of the information is imagined or guessed. There's nothing about the strength of the experience that tells them that though, they have to figure it out by thinking about it.

I think that not all of the information is necessarily guessed. In my lucid astral projection experiences, and my less lucid floating-around-the-room out of body experience, I'm not aware of there having been anything supernatural going on. However, many of my other dreams do incorporate actual information in seemingly impossible ways, so it seems highly probable to me that other people can do that during astral projection or out of body experiences. I speculate that part of the reason for this is that the out-of-body change in perspective is accompanied by a shift in identity, where you're thinking more generally and not quite as strongly as your human self. That generalization makes you more sensitive to other information that you do not have as your human self. Though there's no conceivable mechanism for such a thing within the scope of known science, some people's experiences suggest that this is somehow possible anyway. If there is any direct relationship between the almost schizophrenic separation of one's mental bodies, and being able to access that information, I'm not currently aware of it. I've only astral projected a few times, just enough to experience it and do some simple experiments, and since then it doesn't seem relevant to other explorations of identity and extra-sensory discovery.

I hope that helps. I'd come to this site today to post the distinction between warping a person's model of their own location vs replacing it with a model of a third person perspective. I just realized there's a difference after reading a relevant Greg Egan story this weekend.

As for my question....Some people experience an audible buzzing prior to going out of body. I have never experienced such a thing. I can hear when out of body, and I can hear things, spirits so to speak, that I don't usually hear, but there is no buzzing or vibration or any kind of sound associated with the moment of separation. Does anybody understand what the buzzing or vibration is physiologically? Some people associate vibration with a positively transformational spiritual shift, but I have a hard time making sense of that in this context, particularly with the buzzing. It seems to me to be indicative of a runaway positive feedback which is leading to the experience of separation, or some kind of beating as they oscillate between in and out of body, unable to cleanly make the transition. That's just a guess though.